Applying for a Turkish Visa
We will be visiting the beautiful country of Turkey soon and I wanted to kick of a series of posts that contain all the things that I learned through the process of making this application.
The first thing I wanted to cover is the visa application. If you happen to have a visa from a select set of countries like the US, UK, Ireland and other Schengen countries, you can directly apply for an e-Visa as an Indian National. Once you start the process of filling up the online form, it is just the matter of paying the application fee and downloading the document.
Now if you don't fall into this category, you will HAVE TO go through the manual process. This involves collecting a lot of the documents from the checklist on their website. The checklist also asks for a visa form which I am linking here.
After accumulating all the necessary documents, you need to send an email to the gateway team to request for an appointment for submitting the documents.
If you are applying for a tourist visa, then based on this page you need to specifically contact the relevant centre for an appointment via email which needs to have the following content
- Name of Applicant
- Passport Number
- Category of Visa
- Preffered Location of Appointment
- Preffered Date of Appointment
For example for the city of Bengaluru I had to send an email to : mumbai@gateway.com.tr
I will be publishing updates to this post and adding other posts in the series as I have the information.
UPDATE: Since I added the previous entry, we made two trips to the Visa Office to finally get the visa and complete the travel.
On our first trip to the visa office, we reached well before time and waited outside the mall where this office is located. There's limited seating area so get there early. The applicant needs to go in by themselves based on a token system and then produce all the documents. We had all the documents except a stamp on all pages of the bank account statement.
We hunted in vain to find a branch to authorise the document but were not able to find one on Google Maps. After this we sought another interview date and went prepared with all the relevant documents. We received the visa within a few days and were set for our trip.